More information on water
In an earlier posting, I provided a link to some interesting information on water. My renewed fascination with water comes from my recent appointment as Chair of the Customer Challenge Group at South East Water.
In response to that earlier posting, a friend of mine sent me this information:
“Hope you don’t mind me saying but this fact about water and the body [two thirds of your body is water] is more about the body than water. However, this fact means is that all animals are only walking columns of water bonded together by other chemical substances solid and liquid.But it raises an issue. How interesting is water? Very interesting. In fact books have been written on its “strange” qualities. I use inverted commas because all these properties can be explained by physics.Below is a link to a water for dummies. I don’t mean to be insulting because I have found these dummies books very useful in the past.One of the first issues it deals with is that water is less dense as a solid than as a liquid which has far-reaching consequences which the article doesn’t deal with. It is less dense as a solid because of the crystalline nature of ice which means there is more space between the molecules than in the liquid. Most solids are more densely packed so sink in water or their own liquid.The main consequence is that, if this was not so and ice sunk, then in the ice age (as the best example) layer after layer of sea water would sink to the bottom until all the oceans would have ended up as a solid ice sea/ocean with only the top bit melting under the sun when it was hot. The rest would be permanently frozen eliminating the possibility of life.’
The link he recommends is here.